Minutes to Burn (2001) (57 page)

He looked for the sea lion, but it had suddenly vanished.

Stopping to tread water, he wheezed until his breathing had some semblance of regularity. He breaststroked a few yards quietly, careful to dodge the jagged edges of the broken reef.

His head snapped up suddenly, and he expertly pivoted in the water, staring behind him. He continued to tread water silently for a few more moments, watching the surface closely. Something large swept by him about fifteen feet away, sending a ripple in his direction. An eddy sucked at his feet. Then the water around him stilled.

His hand tightening on the speargun, he gazed for shore, which was about seventy yards away. The sand sloped gradually; at thirty yards out, it was only five feet deep. Despite the glow along the edge of the island, the waters were still dark.

Something broke the surface, but by the time Justin whirled around, there was nothing but a spiral of ripples and a sinking fin. He raised the speargun defensively but gazed at the sole spear for a moment, then low-ered it. Pulling the sling free from his shoulder, he palmed the flashlight, flicking the switch with his thumb.

There was a sudden movement in the water, a wake headed directly at him. The furrow of water was about ten yards away when he heaved the flashlight as far as he could to his left. He folded his arms around the speargun and sank with it, motionless.

The wake had nearly reached him when the shark switched directions, veering off after the flashlight. Underwater, Justin caught a glimpse of movement and then a wall of water struck him as the shark turned.

He kicked to the surface and swam as quickly toward the beach as he could without splashing, sidestroking and keeping his eyes on the waters behind him. When his feet hit sand, he crept forward, still keeping his splashing to a minimum. Sunrise was a good half hour away, but the lines of the beach and the cliff were visible. He continued wading until his chest was clear of the ocean, and soon the water was down around his stomach.

He froze, eyes trained on the shadowy form on the beach ahead. Fat, round, and lifeless, it could have been a segment of log. Focusing on the form, waiting for the beach to lighten, he inched forward. He held the speargun above his head, wincing each time water dripped from it and made a vibration in the water. His lips trembled as he stepped...waited...stepped.

His arms and his knees were starting to wobble slightly when he paused. He stepped forward once more, easing his bare feet onto a rib of lava.

The beach lightened infinitesimally, and large footprints came into view, leading from the top of the trail to the form on the beach. They were the tracks of a four-legged animal, each one forked at the top where the bifid claw had pressed into the sand. He looked back at the form on the beach, now visible--it was a grown sea lion, viciously halved, its tail and rump missing. Fresh blood leaked from the wound, staining the pro-truding plugs of blubber. The eyes were black and glossy like dark mar-bles.

The sand around the body was kicked up, but the footprints became clear again a few feet over, continuing down and disappearing into the ocean. Justin's eyes immediately went to the waters around him. He piv-oted slowly, silently, lowering the speargun.

Behind him and to the side, mere feet away, the mantid pulled her body from her underwater crouch, the water draining from her head and gathering in her broken eye. The spray from the splash covered the back of Justin's head.

He lowered his chin to his chest, teeth clenching. "Cameron," he whis-pered, just as the mantid tore into him.

Cameron's transmitter vibrated once, startling her from sleep, and she shifted her weight, nearly falling from the tree. She activated the unit, and the air immediately filled with the sounds of thrashing. She heard her husband's screaming, and she knew she had lost him.

She leaned back, trying to block out the horrible sounds. Her entire body started shaking, her arms quivering so severely she almost lost her hold on the trunk.

Justin's cries lessened, and then she heard an awful rasping noise, splashing, and what sounded like flesh tearing. The transmitter clicked off.

The mantid attacked Justin even before he could turn to face it, but her legs were unaccustomed to the water, and she mistimed her strike. Hit-ting Justin with the outside of her femur, she sent him tumbling over himself in the water. He yelled, sucking salt water into his lungs, his shoulder scraping against lava. When he surfaced, the mantid hovered over him. The smooth backside of a flying leg struck him on the jaw before a hook swiped a chunk of flesh from his left shoulder.

Stumbling, he spit hard as if clearing vomit from his throat. The blow had cracked his tooth and spilled blood through his mouth. He gagged against the thick fluid, staggering on his feet in the water. The spines of a sea urchin sank into his feet, but he did not respond to the pain.

The creature loomed before him, nine feet of spikes and armor. She lowered her head, regarding him for a moment as her jawlike legs scraped together and then apart.

He dived to his side, rolling over his right shoulder and readying the speargun for when he surfaced. He fired as soon as he came up, aiming for the broken black hole of the eye. It hit the edge of the cuticle around the socket and stuck. The mantid's body contracted, air screeching through the spiracles and bubbling the water as her legs flailed. She stumbled back, shaking her head from side to side, the spear protruding ridiculously.

Justin dragged himself toward the beach on weak legs. He was losing blood at an alarming rate from his shoulder, and he blinked hard, as if trying to clear his vision. The water splashed around his thighs, slowing his pace. Behind him, the creature thrashed in the water, but he didn't turn around; he plodded heavily toward the beach.

Stumbling onto the sand, he went down on a knee. He tried to rise again but could not. He fell flat on his chest and stomach, sand pressing into his nose and mouth. He turned his head and fought to stand up, as the mantid lumbered to shore behind him, but went limp on the sand.

With all her thrashing, the mantid finally snapped the spear against a raised leg. The spear stock sticking out from her head, she made her way slowly to shore, pausing above the still, sprawled body. A chunk of flesh slid from her claw, thunking on the sand. Embedded in the soft pink underside was a small metal disk, Justin's transmitter. The mantid watched the body for another moment, but it did not stir.

Stepping heavily around Justin, she began the long walk back to the forest.

Chapter
68

Cameron
's trembling subsided as suddenly as it had started, though she was still breathing so hard and fast that she thought she might hyperventilate. She stared at the small black squiggles of the graffiti lichen on the bark before her, tracing them with her eyes and waiting for her breathing to slow. Though it was still quite dark in the forest, the sky was just beginning to draw light from the still-unseen sun.

Life was so far from her here in the forest, as far as it had ever been. She couldn't remember ever driving a car, cooking dinner, getting dressed. A line of ants crawled across her thigh and she let them.

Grief came not as a sharp stab but an ache. It spread itself inside her like a deadly flower. Her eyes glazed over; her tongue went numb against her teeth.

She pressed her face to the tree and wept. She gave herself time to cry, relearning as she went. It was an indulgence of sorts, a dark under-current that carried her soothingly even as it drowned her. Her pain was bottomless and calm, and chilling for its purity. She cried softly until her throat went hoarse, cried until it seemed as though the burn in her eyes would never subside.

She had been widowed here, in this tree; everything had changed since she'd shinnied up the trunk. Part of her didn't want to go back down. The loss and defeat weren't entirely real as long as she stayed up in the tree, as long as she didn't have to walk, or speak, or eat.

Death had always been the third member of their marriage, with the work they did, but she'd never thought it would come down like this. It wasn't as if she hadn't prepared herself mentally--she'd never let herself think about rocking chairs and grandchildren, she didn't look older cou-ples in the eye, and it seemed she'd gone through what life would be like without Justin or for Justin without her a thousand times--but still it felt like a blind side punch.

And his cries, Jesus, his cries. They still rang in her ears.

Maybe she could stay up here until she died. Maybe she'd waste away, her skin rotting from her bones until she was just a skeleton perched on a branch, arms wrapped around the trunk. Her resolve to live drained away with her tears; she felt weak, deflated. It was an effort just to wipe her cheek--she couldn't even comprehend continuing the battle against the thing that waited for her in the forest.

Her head throbbed from the base of her skull through her forehead. The dark purple bruises around her neck stood out, dead flowers against her pale skin.

The creature was out there still, Cameron knew.

And there was still another larva unaccounted for. For all she knew, it had already slid into the cool sea and made its way to open waters, its body brimming with virus. If it was on the island, it would be metamorphosing soon.

Cameron imagined being trapped on the island with two creatures. If only she could survive another sixteen hours, she could escape in the helo. But there was no way she'd make it from nightfall to her 2200 extraction, not alone. She imagined the death that almost surely awaited her.

She thought of her father-in-law's gentle hands and white hair, a Christmas table fully set, the slope of Justin's shoulders, the smell of him right before she kissed him, the grocery store, cold fall mornings, the blue sheets on their bed back home, and the reddish glow of their alarm clock. She thought of these things and began to sob.

The agony compounded wherever she tried to turn her mind-- Tank's swollen arm laced through the braces, Derek's wobbling voice through the transmitter, Szabla's body shaking as if she were having a seizure, Juan, Savage, Tucker.

There were no tears left. She opened her mouth, expecting something to come out, but nothing did. Snot ran down her upper lip and she tasted its saltiness before wiping her nose with her forearm. Her shoulders curved forward as she slumped into the trunk, spent. She wasn't sure how long she sat with her face pressed to the tree, but when she leaned back, her cheeks felt raw.

Her voice was throaty and uneven, and the operator at Fort Detrick barely understood to patch her through to Samantha Everett's room.

"Yes, Samantha here. Everything all right? Cameron? Cameron?"

Just hearing a familiar voice reduced her to tears again. "Samantha."

"Yes. Are you all right? Cameron, talk to me. Tell me what's going on."

Cameron tilted back her head to prevent more tears from spilling. "It's down to me," she said. "It's just me. And it."

"Everyone's gone? Even your...Even Justin?"

"Yes," Cameron said. Samantha could do nothing to help, and they both knew it, but Cameron didn't want to let her go, because then she'd be alone floating up in a tree in the middle of a forest on this godfor-saken island. Now, she at least had a connection to the world, to another life, to another person she could hear breathing in the darkness. She pressed her forehead again to the rough bark and let it scrape against her cheek. "Are you married?" she asked.

"No. But I have kids."

Cameron was winded, as if after a long run. "You hold on to them. You hold on to everything you can as tight as you can because there's a time... " Her lower lip wavered a few times before she caught it. "Because there's a time you can't anymore."

"I will," Samantha said. "I will."

More silence. Something chirped.

"There's nothing I can say or do that will be useful, and I'm not gonna fake it," Samantha said.

Thank you, Cameron thought. Thank you for knowing and admitting.

"And things are going to get worse, probably, before we can get you out of there," Samantha continued. "But you make me one promise.

When you hit bottom, you keep going. You find that small part of your-self that's unbreakable and grip it until your fingers bleed. It may not seem worth it to keep fighting, not now, but it is and someday--in a month, in a year, in five years--you'll know that again." She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was filled with intensity. "Don't you give up. Don't you roll over on me."

"Don't worry," Cameron said, her voice edged with a rasp. "I don't know how." Her eyes stayed shut when she blinked, and she let them.

Cameron was in another state of consciousness, though it was not sleep. A swarm of gnats circled her head, and she grew drunk on their whirring. She was trying to fight her way back to alertness, but it was like swimming through mud. Her eyelids felt leaden.

The morning light was finally filtering through the leaves. She had not gotten any true sleep. Her face was swollen, her lips parched and sore. Her contacts felt as if they were glued to her eyeballs; she was amazed she hadn't lost them.

Sorrow struck her from all sides, like a talon closing. She braced her-self against it, closing doors in her mind, containing the damage. She could count her breaths, that much she could do. If she counted her breaths, she'd know she was still alive. Pushing away from the trunk and holding it between her hands, she began to regulate her breathing, focusing on her knuckles. She lost count around 190, so she began again, lis-tening to the breaths rattling through her chest, wiping her mind as clear as a pane of glass.